By Jun Basuil, Manager, AEV Infrastructure Services
The digital transformation of Aboitiz Equity Ventures (AEV) has reached its ultimate milestone. What began as a foundation in 2020 has culminated in a 100% cloud-native ecosystem. In January 2026, AEV successfully shuttered its last remnants of on-premise infrastructure, transitioning from a traditional hardware-heavy model to a sleek, modern, federated, and future-proof “Techglomerate”.
The Foundation: Cloud-First & Future-Ready (2020–2023)
The journey was set in motion in 2020 with the signing of the Cloud-First Policy. This was our commitment to stop managing “boxes and wires” and start focusing on innovation.
By 2023, the vision became a reality. AEV prioritized the migration of all critical business applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS). This was not a simple “lift-and-shift”; it involved refactoring core workloads to leverage cloud-native scalability. This success led to a major physical milestone: the decommissioning of the Cebu Data Center, effectively ending the era of heavy capital expenditures (capex) and the “infrastructure tax” of maintaining physical servers.
2024: The Year of Velocity and Communication
In 2024, the “Great Transformation” shifted gears toward federalization, giving our business units (BUs) the autonomy to move at their own speed.
- Empowering the Pillars: We decentralized Network and Security Infrastructure, enabling teams at AboitizPower and Aboitiz Foods to manage their own digital environments and security postures with greater agility.
- The Future of Talk: We removed the final physical wires from our communication strategy by migrating our Telephony system to the cloud. This eliminated legacy on-premise PBX hardware and enhanced the agility of our telephony infrastructure.
- Seamless Management: With the adoption of Unified Endpoint Management, corporate devices and BYOD alike are now managed entirely through the cloud. This means security updates and support reach you wherever you are, without the need for a corporate network connection.
2025: Security Without the Friction
Last year, we took a massive leap in how we secure our physical and digital workspaces. We overhauled our Wi-Fi infrastructure, moving management and authentication entirely to the cloud, and fully and seamlessly integrating it with our Core Infrastructure.
More importantly, we upgraded our security standard. We moved away from traditional, vulnerable password-based Wi-Fi to digital certificate-based authentication. This enhanced security ensures that only verified, managed devices can connect to our network, providing a smoother experience for users and a much higher wall for intruders.
2026: The Final Anchor Lifted
In the first quarter of this year, we hit the final “Go-Live”. AEV completed the total migration of our on-premise Active Directory to Cloud Identity.
By decommissioning the last of our on-premise Domain Controllers, we have achieved Full SaaS Integration. Our identity is now fully cloud-resident, enabling a Zero Trust environment where passwordless authentication and automated security compliance are the new standard.
Key Benefits of the Transformation
- Modernization and Simplicity: Transitioning from an on-premise setup to a fully cloud-native environment has been a critical step in AEV’s modernization and simplification journey.
- Enhanced Security: The shift to a Zero Trust environment enables automated security compliance and passwordless authentication. Furthermore, moving from password-based Wi-Fi to certificate-based authentication (EAP-TLS) ensures that only verified, managed devices can access the network—all while being simpler and seamless for end-users.
- Operational Velocity and Autonomy: Decentralizing network and security infrastructure has empowered BUs like Aboitiz Power and Aboitiz Foods the agility to manage their own digital environments at their own speed.
- Resiliency and Scalability: By utilizing Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service for critical applications, AEV has refactored workloads to achieve cloud-native scalability and reliability. The resulting infrastructure is global, invisible, and infinitely scalable.
- Cost-Effectiveness: Decommissioning the Cebu Data Center and removing legacy hardware like on-premise PBX systems has eliminated the “infrastructure tax” of physical servers and massive capex. It has also reinforced our resiliency while being simpler to manage, permitting us to refocus our team’s efforts to higher value activities.
- Workforce Agility: Migrating telephony systems and endpoint management to the cloud has removed physical wires and the need for corporate network connections, empowering a truly mobile and remote-ready workforce.
The “Techglomerate” Era
According to Dr. Wolfgang Merkt, Chief Technology Officer of AEV, “Transitioning from our on-premise setup to a hybrid, and eventually to a cloud-only setup has been a crucial step in our modernization, simplification, and future-readiness journey. I understand this makes AEV & Serviced BUs the first in the Group to have a fully cloud-only setup at this scale. A significant enabler for our future, focusing on simplicity, security, resiliency and cost-effectiveness.”
Today, AEV stands as a benchmark for enterprise agility in the Philippines. By removing the physical tether of data centers and the complexity of on-premise identity management, we have traded maintenance for innovation—and set the foundation to take-off. By providing modern, trusted, secure, and scalable core infrastructure services, we can empower our BUs to focus on innovating and delivering business value faster.
AEV is no longer a holding company that simply uses IT; it is a Techglomerate where the infrastructure is invisible, global, and infinitely scalable—allowing us to focus entirely on driving change for a better world.